


Dragon Torture Trio

by ecrituredudesir



Category: Furry (Fandom), Original Work
Genre: Blood and Gore, Death, Gore, Other, Snuff, Surgery, Torture, Violence, extreme violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-19
Updated: 2018-03-19
Packaged: 2019-04-04 15:21:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14023113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ecrituredudesir/pseuds/ecrituredudesir
Summary: A commission for someone on furaffinity.Three women arrange for the research, torture, and murder of a dragon.





	Dragon Torture Trio

Consciousness came with the slow, dull throbs of something he wasn’t entirely aware of. It certainly did not start as pain, but it made the vein at his temple twitch slowly, as if he could not tell whether or not he had been knocked out with a weapon, or drugged by some mysterious concoction that had left him at a stranger’s mercy. Normally, the dragon would have readjusted himself and brushed his head against one of his claws to dredge any lingering discomfort from his features, but the minute that he tried to shift his weight and to move, he found that not only could he not draw his limbs in, but that he was bound. Tightly.   
  
There was a low rumble that starts from his features, his eyes opening—one, then the other, an evidence as to just how under he had been from whatever had brought him this unconsciousness in the first place. His rather large body was bound with chains that had no more than four, maybe five thick, hefty iron links. There were iron cuffs around his wrists and ankles that connected to four posts on the ground, leaving him completely spread open to any outside influence. No matter how hard he immediately pulled against his bindings, there was little more that he could do other than rattle the cold metal. The firm cuffs started to dig into his limbs the more he began to struggle; while the side he could see of them were blunt, the others must have been sharp enough to literally cut into the skin. They ached and groaned against his wrists and legs, but when he actually began to pull on them, he felt them start to cut almost easily into his scales.  
  
From what he could tell, and that was really from only looking up and directly in front of him, to down between his legs, he was in a shadowed room. At the center of the room, a worn looking cable with a single lightbulb hung down, with no kind of shade or any noticeable pull cord to illuminate the room. He could only guess that there must be a door out of sight, above where he was strapped down, because he could not see one to the left or to the right, or in front of him if he were to tilt his head downwards. With no chance of seeing behind him, it was difficult to tell just how big the room was.  
  
He did, however, see the peg wall of tools to his right. It seemed that they had everything from smaller knives all the way up to what seemed to be a chain saw, and the variety of blades, bobs, sharp edges, and mechanical tools is enough to set his heart into a thundering pace in his chest, making him shift where he lied. It was that movement that jostled him enough to let him realize that the floor of the room was a little uneven. It was a very slight, almost unnoticeable slope towards the center of the room. There, at the center, was a metal drain, and if he looked to his left, there was a hose connected to a faucet on the wall. As much as he dreaded the realization, he could pick up, very faintly, the scent of blood. He was not the first one to be in the room, nor would he be the last. The thought made a thick bile rise up in the back of his throat.   
  
He only stopped when he felt the warm little rush of blood against his arm, realizing that he had cut into himself further than he had anticipated.   
  
He starts to make a noise, but it’s only then that he realizes that in conjunction with the bindings at his wrists and ankles, he has also been muzzled. His initial sounds of protests came off as a subtle, but furious grunt against the firm metal and leather keeping his maw closed, but then it faded into a quick, angry gasp and grit against the muzzle. It was finally these noises that drew the attention of the other individual in the room, who he had not even noticed until she made a movement that he could catch from the corner of his eye.   
  
It was a young human woman, who walked with a slow, purposeful saunter that seemed to be for show more than anything else. She was a pretty blonde with her hair tied up in a loose, messy bun, and from what he could see, she was wearing little more than a very short pair of shorts and a sleeveless t that accented every curve and shape of her form. She seemed to have dressed that way on purpose, considering the way she approached ever so slowly, moving down to settle her weight fully against one of his strapped down legs. She straddled his thigh, and he could feel the warmth between her own from where she sat against him. While it was the last thing on his mind, he couldn’t help but feel his heart beat a little faster.   
  
He didn’t understand why she was moving so close to him, or why she wasted no time in leaning forward over him. The young blonde’s breasts were full, and they tilted forward in her shirt as if they might slip free, though they seemed to be particularly fine with staying in place considering how little she moved after that. She busied herself, drawing little circles along the scales of his chest, along his collarbone, then down. The blonde moved away from drawing those cute little patterns on his chest in favor of less innocent actions, her fingers splaying against his stomach and dragging a pattern downwards. At first, there was a confusion that registered in the back of his mind at where that hand was going, before her palm slid down the front of his stomach and then down to his groin. It’s a careful trail, as if she wasn’t sure what to expect from his body, so unlike her own, but she was content to fondle the entire way down, over the sheath of his cock and then over the area just under it.  
  
“It’s such a shame. You’re such a fine specimen.”   
  
The words sound foggy and distant at first, as if he’s just coming out of a stupor, but slowly he manages to somewhat grasp what she was telling him. There’s a slow rumble of a growl in the back of his throat, and he’s bristling. Still, her touch remained soft, gentle. Too delicate for the heavy chains of metal that bound him to the ground, and he was already defensive. The pretty girl continued on though regardless, and once her touch had slid down past his groin, her touch a feather-light caress down the inside of his thighs.  
  
“I’m going to be so sad to see them ruin you.” Contrary to her words, her tone suggested that she wasn’t going to be sad at all. There was an edging anticipation in the back of her tone that had her heart racing and a smile on her lips. She wasn’t terrified for him, she was simply enjoying herself in the time it took to rile him up. The more she spoke, though, the more a cold shiver of fear slid like an ice cube down his spine, leaving him somewhat alarmed and paranoid all at once. It was hard to draw in a breath from the vague fear than was starting to build like a dull inferno in the pit of his chest. He didn’t know what he needed to be afraid of yet, only that he needed to be afraid.  
  
Above him, the girl shifted to slide her weight up against his hips, finally straddling him there as opposed to just sitting against his thigh and teasing him from there. Her thighs were soft around his hips, and her weight wasn’t too terrible against him, but he felt like it was the weight of the world suddenly bearing down on him when he saw the spark of mischief in her eyes. “They’re gonna strip you down until there’s nothing but bone.”   
  
She says it with a nearly dramatic sigh, as she lifted a hand up to his shoulder and rubbed her thumb gingerly against his collarbone. It’s a soft touch but he can’t help but feel his scales crawl at the difference between what she was saying and the body language of her fingers stroking every inch of sensitive skin that she could get her hands on. As much as he squirmed and writhed under her, she would only giggle softly and squirm, making sure to grind her hips down against him in every effort to make him uncomfortable. It was working, and he could feel his body start to warm under her touches and her motions until he was nearly humiliated at how her gentle fingers could make him shudder and gasp.   
  
“You know, I’m almost sorry for what they’re going to do to you,” She noted, giving a dramatic sigh as she moved to finally lift herself up from his prone form. There’s no genuine regret in her tone, only a faux pity that sounded similar to what someone would say when they drive past roadkill. Oh no, what a shame. It’s fleeting and gone before it truly leaves her mouth and instead, and that was truly when his heart began to race out a shock and fear, starting to squirm under her against the bindings once more. His breathing was shortening, and his noises became desperate. They were almost pleading, but he wasn’t sure what he would even ask for. Mercy? To be let go? Neither seemed realistic, since she seemed to be taunting him more than anything else.   
  
She gave a little laugh as she lifted her hand up to rest against his shoulder, moving to lift her lithe body from his frame. On her way up, she gives a teasing little boop to his nose, only to draw back sharply when he snapped out in his fear, squirming uncomfortably in his bindings still as his eyes darted this way and that. He hadn’t meant to lash out at her—lashing out at a captor seemed like the worst possible idea he could have had so far, but he couldn’t stand the look of satisfaction that had been written across her features from her threats so far, and it was that fear that made him so wary of her  
  
Right as his teeth snapped at her, there came the sound of a creaking, squeaky door above him. So he had been right about where the door was, as much as he didn’t want to think about what was coming in and out of it.   
  
“He snapped at me!” The blonde complained in frustration and offense, almost as if she hadn’t expected him to dare actually move against her or try to hurt her. From what he could hear, there were two sets of feet, and in the depth of the back of his mind, he could only pray that one of them would be a person who was willing to help him out of the binds and get him out of the room before any true harm could be done to him.   
  
“That’s what you get for playing with it.” The first voice answered, and he caught a bare glimpse of the owner; a bitter looking red haired woman whose expression screamed volumes about how she would probably much rather be doing this alone than sharing her time and work with her company. She gave the blonde a severe look, eyes narrowed as she moved over to the table where the blonde had been waiting just before he had awoken. She carried a large bag in with her, and then he saw another figure move to the wall on the other side.   
  
“We’re here for work, not for fun,” this third figure said, and it sounded feminine as well. He turned, just in time to see a raven haired woman regarding him with no shortage of annoyance. “But he still should know his place. Did he actually managed to get his teeth in you?”   
  
The blonde seemed to pout for a moment, looking at the spot on her finger where his teeth had barely even grazed her. “No, but it _stings_ ,” she complained, as if he had truly managed to do some wrong to her. In response, the raven haired woman’s nose wrinkled, and she sneered at him with something akin to mockery.   
  
“Well, we’ll just have to make sure he can’t use those nasty teeth while we do our inspection then, won’t we?” She questioned, making a gesture over to the red head who was already poking through her bag. It was as if they barely needed to speak to communicate what they wanted effectively, but each of them was only doing so because of the way it made the dragon’s eyes widen with horror and his throat shift with each thick swallow to try and keep his throat from drying out in his fear.   
  
“I’ve got something in just his size,” the redhead announced, before pulling a hefty, leather, metal, and chain device from her bag. It was nearly the size of his head, and she shifted it with an almost pride as she began to fiddle with it. Only after seeing some of the metal catch the light of the dim bulb in the room did the dragon realize that it was a muzzle.   
  
He was kicking against his binds again already, squirming and thriving against them as he fought for some sort of relief from the tension holding his arms restrained, but also for any ounce of freedom that he could muster. If he didn’t fight here, he had the terrifying, sinking feeling that this trio of girls was going to do something irreversible to him. Something he could never fix or heal.   
  
“Oh, stop your squirming! We wouldn’t have to do this if you’d have just behaved,” the blonde cooed, but she knew that he was moving far too much for her partner to actually get the muzzle onto him. She rolled her eyes and finally moved to stand just above him, and before he knew it, there was the sharp lash of her heeled shoe at the top of his head. He hadn’t expected the kick or the force of the blow, and how much it shocked him and pained him was enough to stun him into a somewhat dazed stillness.  
  
The redhead took full advantage of this, moving to adjust the muzzle and force his mouth open enough that it slammed a metal bit between his fangs. It seemed that the straps around his snout were designed to forcefully keep his mouth closed around a bit in the center—in place to keep him from biting his own tongue or crushing his own teeth by grinding his jaw, most likely. Something designed to keep him alive, suffering, and in pain. He made a noise of protest, but it was far too late to do much more than gag against the way it forced his mouth apart and kept him from closing his jaw anymore. The muzzle was fastened with two straps under his chin, one strap over his snout, and the rest of it making sure that it was safely secured behind his head. He jerked once his daze wore off, but by then it was too late—and his movement only made it easier for the red head to slip her hands behind his head to secure the fastens on the muzzle.   
  
“Oh, that’s a good look for you,” the dark haired girl teased, finally turning her attention back to him and away from the wall of various torture instruments and weapons. It almost seemed like she had been trying to decide what to pull from the plethora of options on display, but she didn’t do so. Not quite yet. She reached down to give one of the straps under his chin a firm tug to make sure that everything was in place, and that they wouldn’t have any accidental snapping incidents while they explored their options with taking care of him.   
  
He gave a pathetic, but terrified growl through the muzzle, despite the fact that such little aggressions were what had landed him in his bondage in the first place. He was wary but exhausted, and in little shape to fight—the minute the dark haired girl made sure of this, she gave a little gesture to her partners. While she stayed at his side, the red head moved down to his feet, and the blonde settled somewhere next to his hip on his opposite side.  
  
There was confusion in his eyes for a moment; he did not think they would try to lift him. After all, he was strapped securely to the floor, and they didn’t exactly seem to be the bodybuilder types that would be able to easily rip a dragon out of the ground when he was chained down. Instead, however, he felt the light, exploring touches of three sets of hands beginning to look him over. Though he craned his neck, he could really only see what the woman closest to him was doing—and that seemed to be checking the skin of his chest from all angles.  
  
There were little pinches and touches, as if they were testing the softness of some of his more vulnerable areas, such as under his arms, the curve of his elbows, the dip of his stomach and hips, the back of his knees, the soles of his feet,  and his neck, in comparison to the parts of him that were covered by the stuff, protective scales—his shoulders, along his joints, his chest, and so on. He didn’t know why, but every time he felt the touch of one of their finger tips beginning to prod at a particularly sensitive area, he would jerk and squirm defensively, as if not wanting them to know just how soft some spots were. Just how easily it would be to drive a blade in between certain weak points. It was a fight or flight response that had him pulling against his chains each time, until he was panting and worn, unsure of how much of a dent he would make in their exploration process.   
  
Probably none, at best.   
  
He became keenly aware of the dark haired woman’s actions first. She seemed to be in charge of examining his upper torso, brushing her fingers to prod at the softness of his arm pits under his forearms, before then going and tapping her knuckles against the ridges of his rib cage in his upper body. She was counting them, it seemed, and that alone was enough to make him worry about _why_ she may have been counting them, and under her exploring fingers, his chest began to rise and fall that much more quickly under her touch. There’s a little smirk as she noticed this, but didn’t seem to care for the discomfort of anxiety that she was causing him.   
  
There’s a moment where she brushed her thumb neatly against the curve down of his neck, and he grimaces from how close she is to his arteries and veins there, how vulnerable he feels from her having such an easy access to a place that most people would have to fight to get access to. From there, the blonde that had been paying him such attention earlier resumed her little touches, but this time instead of sexual or teasing, she’s purely analytical in the way she drags her nails down his stomach, finding the squishy areas where the scales didn’t cover quite fully. His muscles twitch lightly as she drags her acrylics down the skin and across where the scales ride, and he realize that if he wasn’t so panicked and nervous, he might have found the little motions ticklish.   
  
Her pinky dips into the curve of his naval, making a comment about how “nasty egg layers don’t even have a cute bellybutton for us to get a good start with.” She sounds almost as if she’s whining, and next to her, the redhead groaned in annoyance.   
  
“That’s because they’re abominations. That’s why we’re here, after all. To take care of the monsters and nasty things like this.” The red head answered. “You can’t expect them to have feelings or normal physical formations like we do. That’s like asking a fish to fly.”   
  
The blonde sighs, feeling chastised by her partner as her fingers drag along the cleft of his hip bones, finding the joints there to be particularly vulnerable to her touches and pokes and prodding. There was nothing light about her action to suggest that she actually felt any kind of pity for the creature that they were taunting, but there was a lackadaisical way that her touch was lighter to suggest that she was having far more fun with the entire ordeal than her partners were. She was enjoying her taunting, even though both other girls were the picture of serious business.   
  
The red head, however, was much more stern with her touches, and he couldn’t help but squirm and shift in discomfort the more she seemed to explore and analyze his weaknesses. Her nails were sharper than the blonde’s, filed into firm, thick tips that made every little poke and prod ache in the wake of her touch. She started with the back of his knees, finding the ‘skin’ there bare of scales and more than a little soft to the touch. He had never realized just how many weak points his own body had until he felt human fingers beginning to prod at him from all sides. His knees twitched in response, and his legs gave a tiny kick against the bindings. It’s a pure reaction, his muscles twitching at his calves until she snorts softly and begins towards his feet.   
  
He let out a low, faint whining when he feels the strange, subtle stabbing at the bottom of his feet. It starts off as a quiet complaint, because at first, the pain isn’t that bad. Her little stabbing nails, prodding until she found that just above the heel of his foot was probably the worst spot, and the blonde rolled her eyes.  
  
“Aww, you found the spot with the most reaction, huh? I guess you win this time around. You get to decide what we start this off with first, then!” The blonde announced, pulling back from her explorations as the red head regarded her with a brief, but flat look of satisfaction. She had, after all, won their normal little ‘bet’—whoever happened to find their current victim’s weakest spot first happened to be the one that got to start and direct just how they treated their guests. Little did the dragon know, the winner of that bet was the one out of the three that he would probably want to win the least.  
  
“Get me the blow torch,” the redhead demanded almost passively, and from near his shoulders, the raven haired girl complied, standing to move over to the wall.  
  
He recognized the word with some alarm—blow torch meant fire. Fire meant heat, and with him restrained, he didn’t want to know exactly what they were going to do WITH that heat.   
  
“Can’t you get it yourself? Just because we’re using that first doesn’t mean we have to do it *for* you,” the raven haired girl complained, rolling her eyes even though she was the one who was complying with fetching it for the girl anyway. He couldn’t’ see where she was standing, with her voice coming from somewhere above his head, but he can hear the metal rattling against cork board, and then there was something along the lines of another metal-on-metal noise while the woman loaded the blow torch up with a little container of fuel.  
  
When she comes back into sight, it’s with the almost flamethrower-like small tool, which she is screwing the cannister in place with. There’s a little hum, a spark, and then the blow torch flares to life with a little roar. The sight of flame is hot and blue, and he starts pulling against his binds instantly again. Were they planning on burning him to death? The blow torch would be a slow, painful way of doing it, but he didn’t know what to expect from this group, and he wasn’t sure that he WANTED to know what to expect. All he did know was that she tested the flare a few times, and then let it die down enough to move towards his feet to hand the torch over to the ‘winner’ of the bet, who slid back a few feet so she could get a good angle against him.  
  
“Won’t the fire just melt the skin? I didn’t think people really felt like, burns like that.” The blonde wondered aloud, shifting as she scooted back so she wouldn’t be caught up in any of his flailing or discomfort.   
  
“Only if you do it incorrectly. If you take the fire away before it starts to melt into the nerves, there’s nothing quite like the pain of blistering and cracking skin that follows. Especially cracking scales. It’s like cooking a fish alive.” The red head replied, smirking as she shifted the familiar weight of the blow torch in hand. It was almost as if she had experience with it, and knew exactly what she was doing to inflict the most pain possible from such torment. The dragon barely registered their conversation, too terrified of the open flame and the heated sound of the torch running to pay attention to whatever it was they were saying. He was making his wrists bleed again on the bindings, but it was worth it—anything to avoid that flame. The noises against the muzzle were intense, and it already had all three of the girls tense and excited, their hearts beating as they prepared themselves to begin.   
  
“Wait!” The blonde interjected quickly, bouncing on her heels for a moment as she watched the blowtorch move closer. The dragon could feel his heart racing, and for a moment he could almost pray that she was stopping them, that she was truly going to pity him like she suggested before the other two joined their company. Instead, however, she gave a little gesture to the raven haired companion, who wordlessly realized what instructions her partner was giving, and disappeared off to the wall again. While she did this, the blonde moved up towards his head.  
  
“Before you start tearing into him too much, why don’t we have a _little_ fun, first? It’s never any fun if they aren’t watching, after all. Or screaming.” As these words left the blonde’s lips, the dragon felt his heart drop in his chest, nearly to his stomach; where he had thought that he would be receiving a bit of mercy from the blonde, it seemed that she was now only feeding into the fires of what would soon become his misery. He could only pray it was a sick joke, but as he felt her settle behind his head, taking something in hand from the other woman that had wandered to the wall.   
  
The red haired woman looked skeptical at his feet, the low hum of the blow torch still prevalent, and even through the muzzle, he could pick up the scent of fuel burning from the flames. But there’s a sharp click near his head that made his mind ring and ache, as if an airsoft gun had been fired off near his head. A click. As if something was being loaded. Before he knew it, his eyelids were being seized, and one of them was pulled back as far as she could manage against his brow, before she pressed something cold and metal to the inside of it, and stapled it down with a firm staple gun. He felt the strange crack of his skull first as the few centimeters of the stable embedded itself into the thick bone of his brow. He felt, no, _heard_ the crack before any pain actually registered, but then his reflexive instinct was to blink, and that pulled so viciously at the newly pierced skin, which had gone through both his exposed fleshy under-eyebrow, and straight through the scales of his face.  
  
Then the noise started, and he didn’t realize that it was himself screaming against the muzzle until she knocked him in the temple with the butt of the staple gun. He was stunned, both by the pain of the blood pouring into his eye every time he tried to blink. She stopped to admire the way his lid twitched and flinched and how his bottom lid tried to blink upwards to make up for the sudden tension and inability to cover and protect his rolling eye. Just as she started to reach for the second eyelid, however, he started to put up another struggle—and then she slammed the gun into his temple again. He was dazed, and that was enough to grab his other eyelid, and slam the stapler down against his forehead again to pin his eyelid once more—except a little further this time. She pulled it more taunt than his other lid, making the result uneven but also much more painful in comparison to the first one. This one threatened to rip the soft tissue of his inner-lid, but at the same time, it was too well secured to actually let the skin part under the strain of the tension.   
  
While he was struggling to acknowledge what had happened, with this new pain and the shock of disbelief that came with the fact his supposed savior was the one to truly first deliver the pain he was feeling to him now, she finally put down the staple gun in favor of moving her fingers deftly behind the muzzle they’d saddled him with, and she was relatively certain that his screams would be much more sweet when not stifled.   
  
“Don’t try to bite me now,” she hummed in fair warning, but there was something quietly dangerous in the threat of her tone. He had already snapped at her once, and she would not allow such an indignity again. He didn’t think he could try, even if he didn’t take her threat seriously. It was hard to think of anything other than the crackling pain of his bone being fractured at his brow, and the terrible dryness that was making him want to blink so forcefully, but he physically couldn’t anymore.   
  
The redhead rolled her _own_ eyes, as if she was somehow anything other than delighted by his forced, muffled wheezes of agony. “Make it fast. I’m ready to get started,” She noted, sounding more exasperated than she actually was.   
  
“Hold on, already!” The blonde snipped back, before her fingers felt out the latch they’d done at the back of his head, and with a smooth motion, she yanked the muzzle off (nearly breaking his fangs with the forceful way she yanked the metal bar from between his teeth where he had been clenching against it to deal with the pain. He let out a low roar at first, both from the ringing in his head where his teeth had clanged to the metal, and from the blood gathering in little, circular pools around his almost bulging eyeballs.   
  
“Ah, isn’t that a nice sound?” The blonde cooed, pressing a hand to her cheek as she looked down at him, admiring the look of suffering on his features. “You can’t deny that you would have missed his noises if I’d left him muzzled.”  
  
There’s a pause, and the redhead considers this, only relenting because she knew her partner was right. “Whatever,” she huffs, pursing her lips as she finally sat back enough to lift the blowtorch anew. With this fresh agony, the dragon had almost managed to forget the open flame that the equally fiery woman had been so ready to wield earlier. That forgetting was the only relief that he would have from what happened next; it was his knee-jerk reaction to try and pull away from the flash of heat that hits the heel of his foot. Unfortunately, the bindings at his ankles prevented that, and immediately it became obvious that the relief of suddenly pulling ones foot away and feeling the burn _later_ was not going to be a luxury provided to him.   
  
He let out a scream, one that shook his very throat and made him see almost white, because as he could feel the scales begin to crack and split on his feet, he could _also_ feel the way that his skin, sensitive and squishy under it, began to bubble up and force the scales outwards as his foot began to blister unrelentingly. It forced the scales up and apart, already brittle from the source of open flame. He was screaming almost consistently by the time she started to move the flames upwards. Each time it seemed like he was starting to catch on fire, she would stop and slap down his newly damaged foot down with the cool, damp cloth that the raven hared woman had dropped next to her—it wasn’t short enough to offer any sort of genuine relief from the pain. No, it was the exact opposite: she would _smack_ his foot to get the fire to go out, and that made his screams die off into moaning, pathetic whimpers. But when she was sure that there was no more fire to the dragon himself, she lifted her blow torch again.  
  
When she reached the curve of his foot, that sensitive stretch of skin that didn’t touch the ground nearly as much as his heel and the front of his food did, his noises of agony was renewed. That sensitive curve was where the muscles of his foot stretched taunt, and a sensitive source of nerves. She didn’t continue burning him deeply enough to hurt the nerves—it was enough to graze them, and that was to cause that much more pain.   
  
This did, however, set the muscles of his foot twitching. It was involuntary, the pure pain of feeling his skin bubble and his scales crack was enough to make the muscles of his foot seize almost, and the top of his foot began twitching downwards in instinctive response. This hardly helped, considering it started the flame licking up the top of his foot, threatening to start blistering his toes as well. If he was making any noise, and legible plead that any of the women could understand coming from his maw, none of them showed any response to it. They carried on, the dark haired woman returning to the wall to look over the toys she had at her disposal, and the blonde humming sweetly to herself as she sat just over his head, watching him thrash in misery. She almost didn’t even register the loudness of his screams, even though they were forceful enough to bounce through the room. At one moment, though, he swore he saw the bright pink foam of possible ear-plugs in the divot of her ear, muffling his pleading sobs.   
  
His toes had taken to twitching, all individual of his direction, because of the blow torch’s slow ascent. The red head had to, at one point, pull the fire away again so she could fiercely slap out the lingering flames with her little wash cloth. The cold cloth made a sharp, wet _twack!_ against his damaged skin, and he let out a shrill little screech as he swore he felt the force of the blow make the damaged, paper-thin blisters ache. If she hit him much harder, surely the skin would rupture. Perhaps some of it already had—he could see the glimpse of blood on the rag when he tilted his head down to try and get a look at her.   
  
The movement made streams of red from his staple-wounds run down like sick tears from his bulging, aching eyes; perhaps it was just the blood from that, and he was hallucinating the flash of red on the cloth used to put out the raw fire on his feet. He choked out another, desperate noises, and instead of taking pity on him like he could only pray she would, the red head rolled her eyes and smacked him with a merciless bare hand on the damaged scales and blisters of his feet. His entire back arched with the force of the pain, as if someone had compiled it into a dagger and driven it straight into the pit of his chest instead of at his feet.   
  
“Aww, I think he’s crying.” The blonde chimed in, grinning as she dug her acrylics into the back of his head, forcing his neck to crane of painfully. This put him in just the right position to watch as the fire of the blow torch descended onto him again. He shook his head—he didn’t want to watch, but also because he could dig the back of his head against the concrete beneath him to lessen the agony somewhat, and with the blonde lifting his head and making him watch, he couldn’t even rear back to try and distract himself.  
  
“That’s a shame. We could have bottled those tears. I hear they go well with vodka.” The raven haired woman noted from the sidelines, turning an amused smirk back to the blonde while the red head continued on, wordlessly, with the task at hand. They had to hand it to her; she was dedicated, and she was certainly quiet when she worked. It was better than her harsh commentary and ruder words.   
  
The blonde laughed at her friend’s joke, though, even as she looked down to watch the upper part of the bottom of the dragon’s foot start the split and burst with new blisters at the skin was practically boiled with no water. “Oh, there’s an idea,” the blonde hummed softly to herself, a spark of terrible brilliance flashing in her eyes. A quick word to the dark haired girl, and the other woman was off to the small stove-top burner on the table across from the tool wall in an instance. One pot and three bottles of water later, they had water boiling for the blonde’s _personal_ segment of fun, and the raven haired woman had finally found a way to exact her own torment by the time she was finished making those preparations.   
  
The tips of his toes were scorching from the fact that they kept twitching down, unwillingly, into the open flame. The muscles continued to try and flex and contract in response to the pain and damage, but it only made her job easier, since it was nearly like his poor, pathetic toes were already volunteering the pain that was to come for each of them. Despite his attempts to wriggle his toes and spread them away from the flame, that only drew the already blistered skin of the soles of his feet taunt in a way that threatened to burst the blisters that had settled and risen in the skin, and he made a sobbing, pathetic noise when he realized that there was no possible way that he would ever be able to walk on that foot again without feeling the torn tissue of his foot. If he were survive the night, he would never have mobility of his foot or the ability to put his weight on it again, probably.   
  
It became unbearably worse when she moved the fire intentionally up though, smirking idly to herself as she finally acknowledged her partners.   
  
“Do you think if I melt the scales and muscle away from the claws of his toes, I’ll be able to easily harvest his claws? Surely if I scorch him down to the bone there, I’ll be able to pop them off like they’re twigs.” The redhead questioned aloud. The thought was so morbid that through freely falling tears, he tried to pull his legs back again, cutting into his ankles.   
  
“You’ll never know until you try, right?” The blonde replied with a tiny wink, as she moved to check over on the then-boiling water.   
  
“That’s true. And if it doesn’t work, I’ll have my hypothesis answered for next time,” the redhead answered with a little hum as she tilted the flames in to begin circling one of his writhing clawed toes with the source of the heat. His toes flailed and squirmed as she began to burn away the surrounding scales and flesh of one of his toes. Meanwhile, it seemed the water had finally been brought to a boil, and the blonde bounced up to head over to it, taking the entire pan with a mitted hand. “Why don’t we take a short break from the fire and get you something to cool all those nasty burns down with?” She cooed, as if she were actually doing something to help him.  
  
The red head watched her partner with some amusement as the blonde shifted forward with the pot of boiling water, which he hadn’t realized was on the burner the entire time. Thinking they were offering him a brief break in the agony that had his entire calf twitching in pain, the dragon tried to relax for a moment, before the blonde gave a little cackle and poured a good few sloshes of boiling hot water over his fresh blisters. While he howled in agony anew, she laughed louder as if she could drown out his noises while moving the boiling water up to pour over the sensitive sheath hiding his genitals, pouring a little there too as if she were personally offended by his physical responses earlier when it had just been the two of the min the room.   
  
“Come to think of it, do you think this could cook more sensitive parts if you just pour boiling water into them?” She questioned, looking to the dark haired woman who seemed to be pulling a few more toys off of the wall.  
  
“Not sure,” answered the raven haired beauty, giving a single shrug of her shoulders. The dragon could only watch in horror, feeling his hips twitch and his member recede further back into his shaft in pain from the brief exposure to a splash of boiling water, leaving him achy and leaving his scales shiny and a little swollen. “Why don’t you give it a try?”  
  
“I’ve got the perfect spot in mind, but let me heat this back up real quick.” the blonde answered, and though his eyelids were pulled all the way back, he could only let his gaze widen a little further as he realized where exactly she was moving the pot of boiling water. It was going back onto the burner so it could heat back up to a broiling frenzy of splashing, angry bubbles from where it had cooled in the pot from her pouring it on his foot and genitals. Afterwards, though, she carried it right back over to stand over his head, before deciding that crouching would probably give her a better chance at precision. He gave a primal noise of protest, of refusal, of outright miserable, shameless begging—before she began to let the splash of boiling water pour directly into the little pool of blood around one of his eyes that had developed from the staple pressed through his eyelid.   
  
He gave another howl, but this one was purely nerve pain, his back arching as he felt the boiling water bubble and sting against his eyeball. The fluid in his eye was heating rapidly from the fact that it was fresh off the burner again, and his hips flailed in the middle of where the chains kept him bound, the only part of his body able to freely writhe to reflect and try and distract himself from the pain. The dark haired woman moved to stand over his head, reaching down to grip and hold it in place—every time the blonde would let a few drops splash in, he would toss his head to try and throw the water from his eye. This way, he was held fast, and unfortunately unable to do anything other than let it sit and bubble in pain in his eye socket.   
  
He lost his vision in the eye within a minute of it being scalded, and from the way it was going slowly squishy and pliant to the water around it, it had likely been boiled like some kind of food, fresh in his skull.   
  
The dragon gave a pathetic sob, but even the tear duct in his left eye had been scalded too badly to produce any more tears of any sort. They ran hot, but not nearly as hot as the water in his left socket, from his right eye instead.   
  
“Well, I suppose that answers that,” the blonde answered, moving to set the pot back on the boiler for later use, filling it again with water before she returned to his side, beginning to prod his exposed, ruined eyeball for her own amusement. Though the pain was far more focused in his socket now, even the dull, throbbing ache that resulted from her bare-fingered prods was enough to make him groan in quieter discomfort; it was a noise that quickly picked back up into screams. Done with watching the show carried on with his eyeball, the red head had resumed her quest to burn away the skin around one toe so she could start snapping off his claws there.   
  
“I think I’m done letting you two have all the fun,” their third, raven haired partner announced, and to his horror, he saw a little, strange carpentry device in her palm. In her other free hand ran several three-inch-long lumber nails. It was a hand-held push-nailgun, barely any bigger than her palm, and a manual load at that.  She was going to take her sweet time with doing whatever she intended to do to him, but with the blood running in his last good eye, he could barely make out whatever it was she was holding. He could, however, hear the strange noise of an air compressor running nearby, and it wasn’t the same kind of fuel-noise that the blow torch was making. The hum of the air compressor meant a new tool, one that he had not anticipated.  
  
He could only squirm and groan in an anxious discomfort as the redhead continued on with his feet, the burning flame finally managing to get through many of the nerves of his toes, leaving him terrifyingly and traumatically numb in that area considering how much the rest of his feet were throbbing. Fortunately for the raven haired woman, that just meant that he felt it that much more when she lined up the first, sharp point of a three inch nail against the soft, squishy flesh of his inner-elbow, and pressed the little hand-held nailer down. There was a quiet hiss from the device and then the sharp clatter-pop and then the pain started. The hand-nailer had built up the pressure of the compressor running and she had loaded it manually with a nail that was long enough to snap through the squishy-firmness of his cartilage, through the bone of his elbow, and through the rougher scales on the outside of his elbow. He found himself unable to even _bend_ the arm—she had nailed him right in the spot where his bones normally bent, and even trying to angle his arm to pull against the chains again gave him a pain so sharp and puncturing through the nerves of his shattered elbow that he screamed anew.   
  
“Oh, nice one. Gonna make it so he stops squirming so much before we crack open the middle?” the blonde questioned, watching as her partner moved to load in another gun.   
  
“And make it easier for us to separate the limbs, later,” the dark haired woman answered, a smirk rising to her features. “If I shatter all of his joints, that usually makes it easier to hack them apart. This just makes it so he can’t squirm while he’s in the chains, too, so it’s too birds with one stone.” He could feel the cold press of metal right up against where the other nail was already driven through, and started to pull back as much as possible until he heard that hiss and the _ka-chok_ of the nail gun go off again. With the pain already so prevalent in his mind, it almost took a second to register the second nail’s pain, and the delay was enough to make it very obvious that she had done some major damage to the nerves in his arm. He went numb from the elbow down, but despite that numbness, his arm and fingers had begun twitching. The elbow-to-wrist area was twitching the worst, every muscle there spasming but the tips of his clawed fingers also kept contracting and retracting, with his thumb staying dead still in contrast. Something had been disconnected, or left hanging on so barely that the spasms from his brain trying to communicated by a thread left his arm in disarray. It was acting independently, almost, and any attempt he made to move it was met with a terrifying lack of control.   
  
He wanted to throw up at realizing that the second nail had left his arm useless. It had been his dominant hand, one used to bring down every opponent, and now he would be lucky if he could ever close it into anything that looked like a fist ever again.   
  
It seemed even that wasn’t enough though; a third nail was sent through for good measure, and by the time he realized this, he turned his head only to see the strangely disgusting protrusion of the tips of the three blood-stained nails that now all poked from the outside of his elbow. They looked almost like the spikes that many dragons bore on their extremities, or a cruel mockery of what those were supposed to look like. The nails had no rhyme or reason, sticking out at odd, terrible angles that would never actually be natural on his kind.  
  
The redhead finally pulled back after his screams died down to pathetic whimpers after the nails, and though he didn’t want to see it, he wanted to see anything but, the blonde slipped up behind him to laugh softly and tilt up the back of his head. “Wanna see if her hypothesis is right? I do. Your little clawsies should snap right away from the bone, if it’s even attached to the cartilage there-“  
  
What remained of his toes were burnt little crisps, like someone had left a hot dog on a grill for so long that it was little more than a blackened, charred ember. At the tip, she had carefully managed to avoid burning most of his claws, leaving his toes smaller and shriveled and barely connected to what had once been his beautiful, natural weapons of one foot.   
  
“Do you have a good view?” the red head questioned—not directly speaking to him, but to the blonde that had been propping up his head.   
  
“Mmhm!”  
  
“Right then. Pay attention.” And with one gloved hand, she set the blow torch aside and reached down to take the largest claw at the tip, circling her finger and thumb around it…. then breaking it off like she were snapping it in two. The claw broke free from the terribly burned toe easily, but whatever final nerves he had connected against the bone or deeper screamed in unison with him as he watched in horror as he began to lose his claws on one foot. One by one, she broke every single one of them off, placing them neatly to the side to be cleaned and used later. He wasn’t sure if he was more terrified of the pain from the material breaking away from bone, or the sight of parts of his own body being snapped off, bit by bit.   
  
His vision waned, and whether it was from physical or emotional shock, it was very clear that he was on the verge of unconsciousness. The blonde noticed immediately how his head started to go slack in her arms, and gasped in frustration as she let his head drop hard enough to the stone floor that it bounced just a bit, reaching over to her own little toy that she had pulled from the wall earlier just in case he started to fade from being awake.   
  
“Oh, no you don’t!” She snapped, and suddenly there was a shock of several hundred volts directly against his shoulder, deep into his scales that sent a current through him enough to make him briefly convulse. Unfortunately, it had just the effect that she wanted—he was awake in a heartbeat, alert enough to see her lift up a thin stick in hand, with a larger box at its base and a forked prong head; she had just zapped him with a cattle prod. Had he not been tortured so far, he would be offended and furious that she had used a device used on _livestock_ on his bare flesh, but there’s a miserable, disgusted acceptance in the knowledge that out of everything they were doing to him, the cattle prod was probably going to be doing the least amount of physical damage to him. It was terrible mostly for the fact that he was pretty sure that she was going to ensure that he couldn’t even pass out for his treatment.    
  
He groaned in agony, the noise desperate for some sort of relief from the pain that felt like it was throbbing down to his very ankle bone with how destroyed his foot was, though she gave another lighthearted little giggle before moving on from prodding his shoulder with it to pressing it to the nails that had been driven in through the elbow of the still-twitching arm.  
  
“Do you think the metal of the nails can conduct the electricity of the cattle prod?” She questioned, asking no one in particular other than herself. Neither of her partners answered; the dark haired girl was moving down his side in favor of adjusting his knee, making sure to avoid the flames a little further down. The red head was breaking off his last clawed toe, and moving to his other foot, giving him the slow, heel-up treatment that she had given the other foot. He had thought that he was becoming numb to the pain in his foot, but the fact she was moving on to his unaffected one in perfect shape, likely ruining his chances of even standing again, much less walking, he gave a nearly pathetic little rattle to the chains of the arm he could still move, and to the chains of the foot she had just barely begun to burn. Unfortunately, the dark haired woman with the nail gun was working on the same leg as the barely-scathed foot, and just as he started to bend his knee to pull his foot back, he heard the sharp hiss and pop of the nail gun. Instead of going into the soft, squishy skin at the back of his knee (which she couldn’t get too easily since his legs were strapped down), she had waited until he had drawn the scales on his knee straight with his struggling.  
  
From there, she had tucked the sharp end of one nail just under the ridge of his scales, using the little line of weakness from folding them in the wrong direction, and sent a nail down through the top of his kneecap. The howl was immediate, because if he had thought she had shattered his elbow, it was an entirely different thing to feel the firm cap of his knee shatter into pieces from the thickness of the nail driven straight into the middle of it. He jerked and tugged but it was like someone had driven a wedge into the part of his body that was supposed to _bend_ his knee, and he found it terrifyingly immobile with the first nail in. Then the second, which had followed so quickly that he hadn’t had time to prepare for it, and then the third—which he thought he could brace against, but she knew that he _was_ bracing and she waited until he thought that maybe a third one _wasn’t_ coming to slam that one in as well.  
  
He was breathless from his screams, his chest letting off a pained wheeze of a noise from how difficult it was to keep drawing in air when he had made himself so hoarse from his shouting and roars of rage and pain already. But that only gave the blonde a few brief moments of silence, a little rattle in his lungs from their soreness at exertion, to press the cattle prod flush with the metal of the nails in his elbow and let off a sharp zap.   
  
The dragon’s entire shoulder from the curve of his collar bone down to the tips of his fingers jerked in a sick convulsion as electricity was applied straight to the metal pressing to and damaging so many of his nerves. His scream was almost shrill in response, his one remaining eye rolling in its socket as he took the current almost like it were live and straight from a generator rather than an industrial, super-powered cattle prod.  It was only after that temporary seizing stopped that he realized that her cattle prod was not the sort that ran on batteries alone—there was a thin wire leading away from the base of the cattle prod, all the way to a socket in the wall. He was getting electrocuted with a live current from a power source instead of just a contained power box, and he wasn’t sure just how high the damage setting on her new toy could go.   
  
“Ohh, it’s almost like he’s dancing,” the blonde mused in quiet wonder as she saw his limb jerk, before pulling the prod back at a stern look from her partners; while they were usually happy to let her have her fun, her doing so was getting in the way of their own work, and making him jerk and yelp a little too much for either to get any real detail involved in their project. “Fiiine,” she sighed at their firm glances, placing the cattle prod aside to admire the raven haired woman’s nail-work, leaving his entire side limbs immobilized from bending with the amount of metal she’d pumped in between his bone and joint areas.   
  
They both knew that the redhead would be completely absorbed in burning away the rest of his scales and skin and harvesting his claws on his feet for most of the rest of their time together, so it was no surprise when they simply moved around her, though she was being a little more precise in slowly bringing his skin to a painful rise but never going so deep that it would offer him the relief of numbness on the sensitive skin under the cover of his feet. No, she was going to make sure he felt every second of it. He let out another cry, begging wordlessly when he felt the woman with the nailgun move around to his other side, focusing on his knee there as she lifted the cord over the red head’s work area to move around him, stepping over him like he were nothing more than a grit of dirt under her foot. She made sure to give his thigh a firm kick on the side that had already been damaged on the foot area, knowing it was too painful to try and lean up and knee her in any kind of retaliation.   
  
His screams died off into quick, flighty breaths that suggested a panic attack, unable to get air into his chest at the rate that he was losing oxygen, starting to freak out as he felt her press the nails against the top of his kneecap on the other side. He knew what was coming now, how he would feel the prod of the tip as it aligned itself in the hand-held nail gun, how there would come a little bit of pressure, then a lot as the compressed air shot it into his skin like a thick, solid blow dart.   
  
“Oh hush. And stop breathing like that. I’m not going to let you pass out on us from lack of oxygen, either,” The blonde noted, giving a firm slap against the side of his head before bringing her acrylics down to thumb his numb eyeball once more. He could feel the pressure, and hear the connected sound of her nails hitting the dead flesh, but it’s to his own horror that he realized that despite his eyelid twitching in instinct to protect the now useless eye, he couldn’t even feel the pain that would have resulted normally from being poked there. And then, in those few, brief seconds of distraction, the hiss-thump happened again and his knee had a nail driven so far through it that the small, tipped edge managed to poke out through the bottom of the joint, puncturing the skin enough to leave a hole to start bleeding freely there, as well.   
  
The thought of blood made him conscious of the hot, sticky feeling that was already building under his nailed elbow and his finished knee. He was laying in his own blood, and the heat of it, combined with the sickly-sweet copper smell that made his nostrils flare, was enough to make him throw up a little in the back of his own throat. Unfortunately, he couldn’t turn his head, so he was faced with only the option to swallow back down the burn of acid, with tears still streaming freely from the one eye he had left.   
  
The second nail came slower, as if she were trying to drill it into the skin manually before she hit the pressure-lock, sending it in just as hard, but there came with the discomfort of realizing that she had hit the first nail, making the skin split around the two more than his prior ones. He could feel the pain vibrate when the nails hit each other, and then proceeded to sink down anyway, right on top of one another but at just the angle that it tore apart his flesh and drove the bone far apart over his knee, separating his kneecap cleanly. He let out an exhale that was mingled with a shout, and though the blonde was enjoying his noises of pain, she was aware that if he didn’t keep controlling his breathing, he’d be unconscious a lot sooner than any of them wanted him to be. Her little zaps of the cattleprod resumed, but it was intermittently used each time that his breathing became ragged or too short to get any air to his brain.   
  
The three may eye contact between themselves, and there seemed to be a silent, unanimous agreement that it was time that they pick up their task with a little more speed—each of them had had their own fill of fun. Considering the lot of them had had at least a few solid minutes of tormenting him in their own, special ways, there seemed to be a silent, unanimous decision that it was time they take care of what they had brought him out to do—even if the little pout rising to the blonde’s lips suggested that she would have much rather stretched out his suffering for as long as possible. She’d truly been having a blast, even if redhead was the one doing the most for ‘research’ out of all of them.   
  
They began to move quicker in their motions; the dark haired woman made faster work of his other knee, before finally moving up to his elbow on the other side. He could only sob with some sort of relief as the last nail made him scream once, and then she laid aside the gun with a little click of metal on the concrete ground under him. He didn’t know what he was praying to, just that he was praying that she wouldn’t pick the gun back up again. By the time the third nail was driven into his elbow, there were little, strange jerks of his limbs every time the blond moved and sent a pulse through the metal sticking out of his joints. It was as if he’d become a four-party lightning rod, though the only lightning that would come to him happened to be from a power cord to a cattle prod that had been altered to deliver a much more dragon-inclined shock. If he’d been hit with the power of something mean to herd a cow, he would have brushed it off. Had he been standing, however, her little toy would have knocked the dragon flat off of his feet.   
  
He didn’t know if it was just the damage to the connections of muscles or if it was some kind of twisted current of electricity that made his limbs jiggle and twitch as if he were some sick marionette with its strings being yoinked on every few seconds by some invisible, cruel puppet master. Deciding that they didn’t need the nail gun anymore after all, the blonde grinned and moved to ram it between his head and the ground under him, forcing his head up so that he would have to look down at his own torso, and by extension, the red head finishing up the last of his toes, toasting them black like campfire marshmallows and then snapping off the claws at the tip like twigs in the way.   
  
The dragon had no idea how it might get worse. He knew, subtly and instinctively that there was something up between the three of them, something that he could not quite comprehend because they held all of the cards between them and he was little more than the table on which they were playing a game that he’d never know the rules of.   
  
“Right, so let’s get those scales softened up some, right?” the blonde began, earning a nod from both of the other women as she stood to return to the pot of boiling water, and he let out a low, miserable whine at the back of his throat as he remembered the way it had scorched and throbbed at his pained foot and blinded his eye, though he wasn’t sure if she’d go the same route or not. He thought it might be a mercy to not have to watch them torture him any more, but there was some little thought in the back of his mind that reminded him that if he ever made it out of here alive, he would need at least some way of trying to get around. If he could ever move his limbs again. If he could ever think about standing with both feet ruined beyond recognition.   
  
But instead of moving towards his head or his feet again, he watched as the other two women moved to stand back—the red head had turned off the blow torch, and the dark haired woman was already placing it back on the wall while the former set to work looking for something. He wasn’t sure what, because his remaining eye was focused, dry and blurry, on the blonde. She had moved to carefully lift the still broiling (he could hear the plethora of bubbles still rising from the heated metal) water over his stomach, and slowly, ever so slowly, she began to pour it across his prone form. His teeth clenched against one another, so tightly that they made his jaw groan and creak in discomfort as his fangs grinded. That was part of what the muzzle had been for, but they no longer had concern over him doing any damage to himself. Nothing he could do at this point would stop what was to come, and if he brought himself a little extra pain along the way, then so be it.   
  
The effect was instant. His stomach dipped sharply in with a rushed inhale, trying to make sure that he could pull away as far as possible from the burn and sting. Unlike fire drying and cracking out his scales, making them split with blisters, the boiling water superheated them and made them pliable and soft; he was sure they must have mixed some kind of acid in with the water as well, because he could swear he felt the outermost protective layer of his scales just starting to _melt_ away and that was probably the worst part about feeling those little rivlets of liquid rolling down his side and collecting in a slow puddle at his back. There, it sat and ate away at the scales there, too, but the women watched as the combination of the heat and whatever else they had put into his water began to have clear effects; the scales were becoming malleable and shiny, and after the last drop had been poured from the pan, the blonde looked over to where the red head had retrieved a knife from the wall.   
  
It was a small, but terrifyingly sharp instrument that carried a certain air of personal use about it that made him suddenly aware that her motions were about to get much more intimate than just using a blow torch on his feet. She carried herself with the air of a woman who knew her way around a blade, and that was enough to make him shift in discomfort and lingering terror in the wake of what had been a small lull in his agony. His tough scales had kept him from feeling anything more than a painful burning but now it was becoming a vile, itchy and uncomfortable situation as the acid finally began to reach his skin below.   
  
The sharp edge of the blade, however, was pressed to his lower stomach—and in one, clean motion, the red head had scraped the melting scales and a good few layers of skin associated with them clean upwards. She was wary not to splash any of the lingering water on herself, but she had moved so quickly and so gracefully that he hadn’t even felt the blade initially touch his skin at all, even if he’d been forced to watch her make contact. Then his skin was hanging from his stomach and chest in peeling, shredded ribbons and his almost translucent bottom layer of skin was showing and destroyed, leaving strips of bloodied flesh connected to be protective scales. The top layer of his muscle peeked out, the trauma of the smooth scaling with the knife leaving his abdomen muscles twitching and exposed.  
  
Each sharp inhale stretched out what was left of the skin on his stomach, making him regret even his ability to breathe as the red head continued. “That dissolvent worked quite well,” she observed, a little, wry smile quirking the corners of her lips. “Remind me to prepare another batch of it for our next project.”   
  
“Will do,” the blonde answered, watching in fascination as she stripped another two huge chunks of top-flesh off of the dragon. It took all of the second hunk of skin and scale before he had screamed himself hoarse again, and while the blonde _loved_ hearing their projects complain in agony, the red head was annoyed at his shouts, stabbing him once in the thigh before she continued at the task at hand. After all, she had to get any skin contaminated with that acidic water out of the way for them to be able to work with their bare hands, and it was only when he looked nearly flayed like a cut of meat from his collarbone to his hips that she finally moved to dip the tip of her knife into the skin and muscle above his rib cage.   
  
“Dibs on the heart,” the raven haired woman slipped in, and immediately the blonde made an outright noise of protest.   
  
“ _What?_ No way! I totally deserve it this time!”   
  
“I prepped all of the tools and catered to you both,” came the firm response. The brunette intended on leaving no room for argument, and she clearly was not willing to negotiate with her excitable partner. “And all I’ve gotten in otherwise were a few nails. I’m getting the heart.”   
  
The dragon could only barely acknowledge their disagreement over his own gurgle of pain, feeling the tightness of his chest muscles trying to forcibly keep his insides where they were supposed to be: _inside._ His horror at realizing that they were arguing over his internal, vital organs was very real--but the red head was maneuvering herself rather quickly, able to split apart the meat of his muscles above his rib cage first, and then slowly moving the knife in the flesh downwards with slow, but steady sawing motions. Each time he felt the ridge of the knife hitch on a new bone or strip of flesh it was like he was being lit on fire all over again, but with the way the blonde had propped up his head, he had no choice but to watch as he was split open, right down the middle.   
  
Blood mingled with the water that was steadily burning and melting at his back still, as the red head had never cleaned up the puddle under him, but was confident enough to work around it without touching it. By the time she was done and the raven haired woman and the blonde woman stopped their bickering, he was forced to look down at his own stomach and chest, which had a deep cut through the muscle—which the red head then reached her bare hands into, and begin to pull apart.   
  
“Ugh. If you’re taking the heart, at least help her split him up.” The blonde encouraged, gesturing to him. The dark haired woman moved forward, then to his other side, opposite the red head. Reaching in to get a good grip of his other side, he squirmed once, the last change he would get to do so, before shouting in agony as they literally pulled him open for everyone, including himself, to see. His organs lay on open display, each one twitching, pulsing, writhing in their own little way. His blood was flowing freely from where the red head had left a tattered mess of his chest, and from his damaged muscle as well. They had a good few minutes before he’d actually bleed to death though, from the way that the acid had worked to slowly burn his bleeding veins closed and fused them together, as well. Not even his open, grievous wounds would offer him a faster death to let him escape from their clutches. Not until they were good and ready to be done with him.   
  
The blonde settled up near his head, and with a disgusted little noise he realized that she had gotten bored and was idly squeezing at his exposed, numb and boiled eye again, bothering and poking at it like a child might a dead animal, just to see what weird oozy substances and response she could get out of him. His lower lid, burned badly from the boiling water, only twitched up against her fingers in their last ditch effort to try and offer some kind of protection from anything touching the vulnerable tissue. His lower lid in his other eye was the only thing offering it any kind of moisture to make him continue watching the scene. The red head shoved a hand straight into his lower stomach cavity, as if beginning to analyze the kind of shape his intestines were in. Checking their value. Seeing what they might weight in at, and what kind of quality they were.   
  
“At least puncture his kidney for me. It’s fun watching those start to deflate,” sighed the blonde, clearly feeling dejected from being left out of the fun with actually getting inside of the dragon. The red head rolled her eyes, reaching up with the very tip of her knife and driving it a few centimeters into the organ that she could clearly and quickly identify as the kidney. It was one of the least interesting parts about him, so she didn’t mind damaging his insides a little more than they already were, if it meant the blonde wouldn’t complain any further.   
  
Puncturing an organ always came with the blonde’s favorite part—the slow deflation of whatever gunk, goo, slime, or filth that the organ had contained into the rest of the chest cavity. He could feel the damage to the organ, but what was worse was the way his body continued to try and act and work on, normally—which usually meant the organ, despite being breeched, continued to pump stuff out of the new hole that had been made in it. This caused a nasty leak of those organ contents—a little gush of nasty goo and content began to bubble up from the hole that the red head had made, and immediately began to overflow into the rest of his chest cavity.   
  
The raven haired woman, in contract, was already focused on something completely different from his lower intestine, though. While the redhead had fetched the knife from the wall, she’d picked a small, handheld device with a circular blade at the tip of it. A small bone saw. Right as she flipped the little switch, making the high pitched whirring noise begin to fill the echoing room in place of the blow torch’s earlier roar and the air pump’s skipping whirr, the blonde leaned over his head, making the attention of his gaze draw back up to her.   
  
To him, and only to him, she gave a broad grin and a twinkling gaze. If she wasn’t going to be allow in the chest cavity, she was going to make sure she had enough fun of her own, right at his head. “Do you remember earlier, when you snapped at me?” she questioned in a sing-song sweet voice, her lips tilting up into a perfect smile that made dimples appear just below the apple of her cheeks. “Why don’t I remind you? It was with these teeth. You *see* these teeth? Oh wait. You don’t, but you will.”  
  
And before he could even make a noise to answer her, her fingers pulled back, and were digging into the sockets of his working eye, pressing her fingers into the hollows made by pulling his eyelid back so far that he wasn’t able to close it, pressing them in so deeply that with her sharp acrylics, she was able to outright grab his eyeball, pulling it ever so slowly and carefully up, out of the socket of his head. His damaged eye rolled in agony, going backwards in his head as his brain tried to process the odd image of his eye moving in her palm, facing up, facing down, facing everywhere but forward where his head was trapped between her knees. He was stuck in an uncomfortable, distant state of disbelief of what he was seeing, combined with the pain of his chest cavity being raided.  
  
“These were the teeth that I was talking about. Those snappy little bastards that you thought would totally look better if they were embedded into my hand, probably,” she pointed out almost boredly, directing his eyeball to look at his own mouth, shoving the cattle prod between his lips and using a light shock to make him part them, his tongue lolling out from where it’d been pressed so hard against his teeth to try and deal with the pain. She snickered, and managed to _barely_ pull the eye, with the tissue still connected, down so he could taste his own eyeball, before twisting it to give him an inside look at his own, parted mouth. His tongue recoiled quickly into his mouth, and he began to shake his head, trying to almost gently dislodge her hold on the sphere of his eyeball.   
  
“Don’t want to watch?” she hummed, pressing her tongue to the inside of her cheek. “That’s okay. I won’t make you. She’s almost done anyway, you know.” She chimed—the dark haired woman had paused only to watch the blonde liberate his eye from his head, still connected by the little string of tissue and nerves and muscle. He could no longer see what any of them were doing to understand what was being said or why it was being said, but he could certainly _feel_ when that bone saw connected to his first rib. It sent shatteringly vivid pain through him, and unfortunately when he inhaled to scream, it only pushed more connective tissue between his bones into the path of the little bone saw, shredding blood in a little arc against the red head and the ceiling above.   
  
The former scoffed in annoyed offense, earning an apologetic shrug from her partner. On she continued, sawing through the first rib and removing it neatly, to the side. Another followed, then a third, all the while the dragon struggled to scream as he felt the redhead rifling around in his lower abdomen, and the raven haired one popping off ribs like she were at a barbeque and she were fixing a leftover plate.   
  
Meanwhile, not to be outdone, the blonde cradled his still-connected eyeball in her hand, making the iris and pupil face her. She could see how the air had made the whites of his eyes bloodshot, but there was a ring of color around the pupil that made the little orb in her palm look obscurely like some kind of precious jewel instead of viscera on her fingers.   
  
“It’s a shame. You had pretty eyes, at least,” she hummed, knowing that her sweetly smiling face would be the last thing he ever really “saw.” Once she was sure that he’d noticed her, practically looking at her own reflection in the darkness of his pupil, she tightened her fist around the little bundle of fluid and tissues. It wasn’t quite like squeezing a grape; it was a little more dense than that, and the tissue offered her more resistance. No, it was somewhat akin to squeezing a very small lemon or kumquat. Like there was a skin around it, but with a deep satisfaction, she finally felt the little gush of fluid down her bare hand as she crushed his eyeball in her palm.   
  
He gave a pathetic little wheeze as he felt the sickening ‘pop!’ of his eyeball in her palm. He couldn’t get in the breath to scream anymore; at some point, the bone saw had gone a little too far into the area and shredded part of his lung. Slowly, the air in his left lung was beginning to come in shorter, less-frequent bursts as the cavity of his lung began to fill up with blood. Before long, he would drown it it—and that was a fate that they hardly had in store for him.   
  
No, the raven haired woman wanted her pound of flesh, and she knew exactly where it was, too. While she could have easily just rummaged up under his rib cage and done it, there was a certain satisfaction to removing the white, red-gleaming bones of his rib cage one by one and exposing her target.   
  
There, under a breast-bone that she quickly sawed away as well, was the hefty, thick muscle that was struggling so hard to keep pumping blood through a body that was so battered and maimed that it probably wasn’t getting much blood even back into him. Finally the dark haired woman smiled, and with as much leisure as she could muster, the woman’s bare fingers slipped forward to wrap around the pulsing, beating heart in his chest.   
  
Some part of him, in the back of his brain that was struggling against consciousness, knew that this was it. There was no way that she could touch his heart, beating still and struggling onwards, and him survive. It snapped a last bit of terrifying flight-or-fight in him that had him moving his hips, the only part of him that he could get any leverage _to_ move with, and he was making wordless, agonized noises that might have been some kind of demand, some kind of fury to be released from her hold and freed from the sharpened chains that had, by now with his frantic twitching and useless limbs, cut down to the bones of his ankles and his wrists.  There were small puddles of red under both.   
  
But she wasn’t to be intimidated so easily. This little burst of energy would precede his death rattle, she was sure, and if he was going to fade with his last struggle in the world, she would make she he knew pain in punishment for daring to start moving against so late. The entire afternoon of fetching and preparing her partner’s tools would be all worth it for this, and there was a light in her eyes as her second hand moved in, both of them clutching around his bare heart, still beating away.   
  
She squeezed gently at first, almost as if she were testing the softness of a stuffed animal, but when his protests did not stop, she firmed her grip. Her thumbs pressed next to each other on tone of his valves, before centering over the middle of the beating muscle, and she began to press down. The way she held his heart in her hands was almost as if she were strangling someone—the thumbs pressed down together, unmoving even as he struggled and tried to get away. The pulse of blood became slower; it was harder to move blood in and out with his heart throbbing away like it’d never stop.   
  
As she began to block off valves with the pressure, and _truly_ begin to crush his heart, his last, final flails became desperate and sluggish. His pace was slowing, and he had no alternative to try and kick her offer or push her away. The blonde and the red head had stopped their own, personal pet projects of examining and ruining his body in favor of watching their third companion work. She was methodical, dedicated, and this showed the most clearly whenever she was literally pushing the life out of something. It was like watching an artist make a brush stroke, if the brush stroke was slowly forcing the movement of a heart to stop.   
  
His even, thumping pace began to slow. She could feel the pulse of his life blood moving through her palms so slowly that it was almost like it’d freeze in her touch, before deciding that this, too, was too slow. One of his lungs was collapsing, she could tell from the way blood was beginning to push from his lips and the way his breath seemed to make little bubbles appear in the blood of his chest cavity, proving that there was a breach in his lung and … well, the rest of the mess the bone saw had made.   
  
Deciding that the entire ordeal had taken far too much of her patience so far, her gentle squeezes finally gave way to all of her nails digging into the muscle of his heart at once, crushing it in her grip, before using that crushing grip to _rip_ her hold back anew. Not only was she crushing his heart, she was tearing it from his very chest—and judging from how her fists pulled apart when she pulled the heart towards herself, she was tearing the heart apart, too.   
  
The last noise he ever made was a lowkey groan mixed with a high-pitched wheeze of a lack of air, a lack of breath in his lungs, but what truly did him in was the way his heart splattered into tattered pieces across his split-open chest as the dark haired woman left little pieces of him wherever they fell. She felt his heart rip from its tight binds in his chest, and give a few, last, pathetic throbs of whatever was left of the twitching muscle in her palm after she’d pulled it from his chest.   
  
The crushing of his heart had let a comfortable, even silence across the room between the three of them. It took a few moments for his mind to realize that it was no longer getting fresh blood, and it became clear afterwards how each part of his body was beginning to shut down without the fresh oxygen that that blood carried with it. Unlike with cardiac arrest, there was no heart to try and send signals to start beating again too—just an empty hole where it had just so previously been. Slowly, with one last, extended, blooded wheeze, the dragon ceased to function. The twitching of his muscles continued on for a few seconds, but as the disconnected synapses and damaged nerves failed to receive any new, even scrambled signals, his uneven, uncontrolled movements in his hands, wrists, and legs ceased as well.  
  
The raven haired woman let her hands lower, and next to him, she let the squished, crushed, and ripped remains of his heart fall to the ground with sickening little splats. The dragon had breathed his last breath, and their little games were now at an end; they would leave the red head to collect the parts that she wanted to keep from the ordeal, and they would dispose of him properly, before washing down the room with the nearby hose, and cleaning themselves free of the dead creature’s blood.


End file.
